Actually, if we define Fedora as a true meritocracy, we will be able
to establish the leaders of the project this way.

That's all well and good, except it's clearly not a "true meritocracy".
At best the structure is defined by reputation based on historical
merit, although that's still not a very realistic assessment.
There are a lot of facets to the project, and who its leaders are depend
on which facet you're looking at. For instance, gdk is clearly one of
our leaders in many senses, and for good reasons, but he doesn't
contribute a wealth of code. At the same time, there are quite a few
people who contribute significant amounts of code but have relatively
low visibility. These people are also our leaders.
Defining Fedora as a meritocracy really only allows for one of those
classes to be leaders, unless you take the most vague sense of "merit"
possible, which seriously undermines the point of trying to categorize
what sort of organization we are. The term is basically a convenient
fiction to gloss over real introspection.
Also, top posting is one of the many roots of much human suffering.
Just a thought.

I am not sure if everyone here read Elliot Lee's take on the subject.
http://www.redhat.com/magazine/016feb06/features/meritocracy/. Obviously
there are multiple facets to the project which provides enough scope for
some interesting water cooler chat. Anyone who contributes to the
project regardless of the nature of it
(http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/HelpWanted) gets merit but letting
everyone set the direction would only result in anarchy and we might
not be able to sustain the project without a rigorous sense of direction.